Alan Cumming, just one of the pictures by KK Dunas that will be on show.

A selection of contemporary Scotland’s most famous faces will feature in a new exhibition of photography by K.K. Dundas, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week. The exhibition runs from 29 October 2012 to 3 March 2012. The 18 portraits on display include the well-known actors Alan Cumming, Elaine C. Smith and Billy Boyd - all former students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the country’s leading school of music, dance and drama. Others images are of recent graduates and current students, such as Katie Leung, who is perhaps best known for her role in the Harry Potter films.

In 2010, to celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Conservatoire commissioned Glasgow-based Dundas, who specialises in theatre and portrait photography, to take portraits of past and present students from the school of drama. This selection of images, presented in collaboration with the Conservatoire, features some of the institution’s most illustrious alumni, from old hands to more recent graduates. Highlights include Dundas’s engaging portraits of actor Bill Paterson, comedienne Ruby Wax and Colin Morgan, star of theBBC TV series Merlin. The majority of works in the display will be on show for the first time, and, all 18 portraits have been generously donated by the photographer to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Leading Lights is part of the season of photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn, which also includes Jitka Hanzlová in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, the first UK exhibition from one of the most celebrated photographers working in Europe; and Lucknow to Lahore: Fred Bremner’s Vision of India, a stunning collection of images of the subcontinent from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century.